The student arrests were sparked on Wednesday at an event where Thailand’s military dictator was speaking. General Prayut Chan-o-cha leads the military junta, which has been in charge of the country since the military’s most recent coup on May 22nd. It is the 18th military coup in Thailand since 1932.

Chan-o-cha was speaking in Khon Kaen, a region in northeastern Thailand. The students slipped into the event wearing shirts reading “We don’t want the coup,” making the three-finger salute before they were arrested. In the Hunger Games, it is a sign of dissent against the fictional, tyrannical government, Panem. According to the Post,

“Prayut appared to laugh off the challenge to his authority. ‘Well, that’s it. But it’s okay. Go easy on them. we will take care of the problems. Any more protests? Make them quick.’”

“The student demonstrators, identified later as Wasan Seksit, Jetsathit Namkot, Jatupat Boonpatraksa, Phayu Boonsophon and Wichakorn Anuchon, were grabbed by police and military security as they showed off their T-shirts and salutes. They were taken to the 23rd Military Circle’s Sri Patcharin base to undergo ‘attitude adjustment,’ according to officials.”

Later on Wednesday, Bangkok students were arrested for staging a protest in solidarity with the Khon Kaen saluters. The protest was disguised as a picnic, a common tactic to hide shows of dissent in Thailand.

The arrest of “dissident” students is nothing new. Time reported that the Thai Lawyers for Human Rights group

“has documented ‘hundreds, possibly thousands’ of people in the northeast who have been ‘summoned, monitored, followed and harassed by the military.”

“In June police arrested a lone student reading George Orwell’s anti-authoritarian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four and eating a sandwich, while others have previously been detained for displaying the three-fingered salute.”

The popularity of the Hunger Games book series and films highlights a silver lining in the midst of current world affairs. Its strong resonance with younger (and older) generations demonstrates the growing distrust and discontent toward government by citizens around the world.

November 22, 2014

Similar in premise to many other science fiction films, something sets Interstellar apart: Many of the images are–for the most part–scientifically accurate, based on lensing calculations produced by Cornell University and California Institute of Technology scientists that show what black holes or wormholes look like. At this point, the blockbuster movie has created such a stir that one would almost have to be inside a black hole not to know about it. And while the science fiction thriller may have taken some liberties with science to make its Hollywood plot work, the imagery comes straight from science–National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded science, in fact.

“Gravity bends the path that light follows in space,” said Pedro Marronetti, an National Science Foundation program director for gravitational physics and Google Scholar. “The stronger the gravitation, the more dramatic its effect.”In the plot of Interstellar, Earth is dying; to save the human race, astronauts and scientists search for a new planet via a wormhole, essentially a shortcut through space to find a giant black hole at the other end. Interstellar producers sought to make visual representations of the wormhole as accurate as possible. They worked closely with Kip Thorne, a theoretical physicist at Caltech and the film’s executive producer, who gave the special effects team the scientific equations to create a reasonable facsimile of a wormhole. Thorne’s involvement in this gravitational lensing project led him to talk with the three Cornell grad students and their Caltech collaborators. The research of Bohn, Hébert and Throwe “on visualizing colliding black holes by gravitational lensing is very interesting and important,” Thorne said.

Wormholes do not actually exist in space, but black holes do, Throwe said, so the students created two short videos for Thorne, which showed what moving by a black hole in space would look like. It would be impossible to move through an actual black hole, they said, because the pull of gravity would tear a person apart.

Astronomers haven’t been able to visually observe black holes because nothing can escape from them, not even light or radiation. They can only be studied by noting their effects on nearby objects. That’s what makes this recent research so important–because it creates a new visualization.

The four graduate students who work in NSF-funded, Cornell astronomy professor Saul Teukolsky’s group–Andy Bohn, François Hébert, William Throwe and Katherine Henriksson–as well as NSF-funded Caltech researchers Mark A. Scheel, Nicholas W. Taylor and undergraduate Darius Bunandar–have been doing related research and recently published their work about binary black holes on an online repository for scientific papers called ArXiv. The paper, “What Would a Binary Black Hole Merger Look Like?” immediately garnered media attention, including in Nature.

“We know [interstellar travel through wormholes is] kind of crazy, but it makes a good story,” Throwe said. Thorne used the students’ videos to help explain to the special effects team what kinds of information would be needed to make the visualizations believable.

While much is known about what a single black hole would look like in space, little was known about what two merging black holes would look like. New technology allowed the students to do that for their paper.

“The idea that you’re going to be one of the first people to look at what a merging pair of black holes would look like is a good incentive to keep going,” Hébert said.

One of the best descriptions of wormholes in science fiction was the movie Contact, based on a novel by Carl Sagan. While Sagan was writing the novel, he also consulted an expert in General Relativity, Kip Thorne, to make sure that the way wormholes were treated in Contact was actually as close to being scientifically correct as possible. Ellie, played by Jodie Foster, travels through a series of wormholes to a place near the center of the Milky Way galaxy, where the crew meets the senders of a message to Earth guised as persons significant in the lives of the travelers.

Studies from French and German physicists suggest that some unexplained objects in the universe might actually be “wormholes” -portals to other universes. Thibault Damour and Sergey Solodukhin of the International University Bremen, believe that wormholes mimic black holes so closely that it might be impossible to distinguish.

Black holes and wormholes each distort the space and around them in a similar way, but though topically similar, they are, pardon the pun, universally different:

Black holes are the evolutionary endpoints of stars at least 10 to 15 times as massive as the sun. When a star of that proportion undergoes a supernova explosion, it may leave behind a burned out stellar remnant. With no outward forces to oppose gravitational forces, the remnant will collapse in on itself. In other words, all of its mass is squeezed into a single point where time and space stop. The point at the center of this black hole is called a singularity. Within a certain distance of the singularity, the gravitational pull is so strong that nothing – not even light – can escape.

Wormholes, on the other hand, are theoretical warps in the fabric of space-time. If wormholes could exist, they could potentially function as time machines. (They also provide the fodder for many science fiction novels…) According to Einstein’s theory of relativity, time passes more slowly for a highly accelerated body. If one end of a wormhole were accelerated to close to the speed of light while another were stationary, a traveler entering into the stationary hole would emerge in the past from the accelerated hole.

Physicists like Stephen Hawking, however, aren’t convinced that wormholes even exist, arguing that properties of wormholes would be physically forbidden by basic universal laws. If time travel existed, it would cause irresolvable paradoxes: it would be impossible, for example, to travel back in time and kill your former self.

Ironically, Damour and Solodukhin theoretically differentiate the two by using “Hawking Radiation,” the existence for which Hawking himself argued in 1974. Hawking radiation is an emission of particles and light which should only come from black holes and would have a characteristic energy spectrum. Both Damour and Solodukhin found this radiation to be so weak, however, that it would be completely swamped by other sources, such as the background glow of microwaves left over from the big bang.

Unfortunately, it seems the only way to definitively resolve the question is to make the plunge inside one of these massive holes – but considering that doing so would cause the instantaneous explosion of every atom of anyone or anything daring enough to try, our closest experience is still a visit to the science fiction section of local bookstores.

The latest installment in “The Hunger Games” film franchise opens on Nov. 21 and promises to be another blockbuster. What accounts for the movies’ success? The obvious answer, of course, is the combination of the irresistible Jennifer Lawrence and Hollywood special effects with a rollicking good story.

But we shouldn’t ignore the deeper themes of the tale, which are not only classic but classical, reaching back to Greece and Rome and the very foundations of Western culture.

At the heart of the story are three beautiful, heroic young people: Katniss Everdeen and her male romantic interests, Peeta Mellark and Gale Hawthorne. They form a love triangle, but they also represent, from the point of view of the ancients, an aroused citizenry banding together and fighting for freedom against an evil empire.

Katniss, played by Ms. Lawrence, is “an updated Theseus,” according to the books’ author, Suzanne Collins. In Greek myth, Theseus and other young people from Athens were sent as tribute—human sacrificial offerings—to King Minos in Crete. The king turned them over to the Minotaur, a murderous beast who was half-man and half-bull and lived in a maze or labyrinth. The intrepid Theseus killed the Minotaur and saved his countrymen.

Like that ancient Greek hero, Katniss defies an oppressive empire and sparks a revolution. But it’s an update with a twist. Today’s Theseus is female, which calls to mind not only modern girl power but also ancient lore. Her character is inspired by the famous Amazon warriors and Atalanta, the great female runner of Greek myth. Katniss also recalls Artemis, goddess of the hunt—Diana to the Romans—because her preferred weapon is the bow and arrow.

Like imperial Rome, the country of “The Hunger Games” is a once-free society now dominated by a corrupt and rapacious capital city. A president exercises, in effect, the power of an emperor. He lives in a grand city called the Capitol, and his government feeds off its provinces, much as ancient Rome did. The people of the Capitol radiate a baroque and overripe luxuriousness, like the lords and ladies of imperial Rome, while the provincials are poor and virtuous.

This pattern goes back to the great Roman historian Tacitus (ca. 56-117), who drew a contrast between the primitive but free Germans and Britons and the decadent Romans who had lost their republican virtue under the Caesars. Tacitus would have understood why the bad guys in Ms. Collins’s Capitol have Latinate first names such as Coriolanus Snow, the coldhearted president, and Caesar Flickerman, the smarmy host of the televised version of the games. Meanwhile, the rebels from the provinces have names that evoke nature (“katniss,” for example, is the name of a real, edible plant) or have English or Greek roots—anything but Rome.

In “The Hunger Games,” the people are kept in line by hunger and entertainment. The privileged folks in the Capitol get both “bread and circuses”—the phrase comes from the Roman satirist Juvenal. The Latin is “panem et circenses,” and Panem is the name that Ms. Collins purposefully gives the country where her story is set.

The most important entertainers are the participants in the hunger games, a fight to the death, reminiscent of the gladiatorial games of ancient Rome, whose influence Ms. Collins also cites. The games begin with the very Roman ritual of participants entering a stadium on chariots to the wild applause of the crowd. Like ancient gladiators, the participants are doomed but idolized.

Much as in the myth of Theseus, the participants in the hunger games are offered as tribute to the Capitol, one young man and one young woman from each district of the country. For the lone survivor, the games are a rite of passage. All ancient societies made young people go through such rites. In Athens, new warriors had to survive in the woods, and there is an echo of this in the hunger games, which are set in a jungle.

Myths work because their themes are of abiding interest, and “The Hunger Games” is no exception. We still have rites of passage for young people today. If ours tend to test mental rather than physical stamina (college entrance exams are more common than boot camps), they remain daunting and demanding in their own way—which perhaps explains why the life-or-death stakes of “The Hunger Games” strike such a deep chord among our decidedly nonclassical teens.

—Prof. Strauss teaches history and classics at Cornell. His next book, “The Death of Caesar: The Story of History’s Most Famous Assassination,” will be published by Simon & Schuster in March.